The Young Lions (38 page)

"You'll do," said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian's card. "Excellent. It doesn't look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometres a day and never feel it. Eh?"

"I did not say anything, Colonel," said Christian.

"Full field duty," the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. "Eh?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. "Roll down your trousers, Sergeant," he said. He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. "What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?"

"I was a skiing instructor, Sir."

"Eh?" The Colonel glared at Christian as though he had just insulted him. "What was that?"

"Skiing, Sir."

"Eh," said the Colonel flatly. "You will not ski with that knee any more. It is for children anyway." He turned away from Christian and washed his hands, with meticulous thoroughness, as though Christian's bare pale flesh had been unutterably filthy.

"Also, from time to time, you will find yourself limping. Eh, why not? Why shouldn't a man limp?" He laughed, showing yellow false teeth. "How will people know you have been in the war otherwise?"

He scrubbed busily at his hands in the large enamel sink that smelled so strongly of disinfectant as Christian went out of the room.

"You will kindly get me a bayonet," Hardenburg said. Christian was sitting at his side, looking at his leg, stretched, still stiff and dubious, out in front of him. In the next bed the Burn lay, lost as always in his silent Antarctic of bandage and his tropical and horrible smell. Christian had just told Hardenburg that he was leaving the next day for the front. Hardenburg had said nothing, but had merely lain still and rigid, his smooth, swathed head like a frightening and morbid egg on the pillow. Christian had waited for a moment and then had decided that Hardenburg had not heard him.

"I said, Lieutenant," he repeated, "that I was leaving tomorrow."

"I heard you," Hardenburg said. "You will kindly get me a bayonet."

"What was that, Sir?" Christian asked, thinking: It only sounds like bayonet because of the bandages.

"I said I want a bayonet, Bring it to me tomorrow."

"I am leaving at two o'clock in the afternoon," Christian said.

"Bring it in the morning."

Christian looked at the overlapping, thin lines where the bandage crossed over itself on the round, smooth surface, but there was no expression there, of course, to give him a clue to what Hardenburg was thinking, and as usual, nothing was to be learned from the everlasting, even tone of the hidden voice. "I don't have a bayonet, Sir," he said.

"Steal one tonight. There is no complication there. You can steal one, can't you?"

"Yes, Sir."

"I don't want the scabbard. Just bring me the knife."

"Lieutenant," said Christian, "I am very grateful to you and I would like to be of service to you in every way I can, but if you are going to…" He hesitated. "If you are going to kill yourself, I cannot bring myself to…"

"I am not going to kill myself," the even, muffled voice said.

"What a fool you are. You've listened to me for nearly two months now. Do I sound like a man who is going to kill himself?"

"No, Sir, but…"

"It's for him," Hardenburg said.

Christian straightened in the small, armless wooden chair.

"What's that, Sir?"

"For him, for him," Hardenburg said impatiently. "The man in the other bed."

Christian turned slowly and looked at the Burn. The Burn lay quiet, motionless, communicating nothing, as he had lain for two months. Christian turned back to the equal clot of bandage behind which lay the Lieutenant. "I don't understand, Sir," he said.

"He asked me to kill him," Hardenburg said. "It's very simple. He hasn't any hands left. Or anything left. And he wishes to die. He asked the doctor three weeks ago and the idiot told him to stop talking like that."

"I didn't know he could speak," Christian said dazedly. He looked at the Burn again, as though this newly discovered accomplishment must now somehow be apparent in the frightful bed.

"He can speak," Hardenburg said. "We have long conversations at night. He talks at night."

What discussions, Christian thought, must have chilled the Italian night air in this room, between the man who had no hands and no anything else left and the man without a face. He shivered. The Burn lay still, the covers shrouded over the frail frame. He hears now, Christian thought, staring at him, he understands every word we are saying.

"He was a watchmaker, in Nuremberg," Hardenburg said.

"He specialized in sporting watches. He has three children and he has decided he wants to die. Will you kindly bring the bayonet?"

"Even if I bring it," Christian said, fighting to preserve himself from the bitter complicity of this eyeless, voiceless, fingerless, faceless suicide, "what good will it do? He couldn't use it anyway."

"I will use it," said Hardenburg. "Is that simple enough for you?"

"How will you use it?"

"I will get out of bed and go over to him and use it. Now will you bring it?"

"I didn't know you could walk…" Christian said dazedly. In three months, the nurse had told him, Hardenburg might expect to take his first steps.

With a slow, deliberate motion, Hardenburg threw back the bed-clothes from his chest. As Christian watched him rigidly, as he might watch a corpse that had just risen in its grave and stepped out, Hardenburg pushed his legs in a wooden, mechanical gesture, over the side of the bed. Then he stood. He was dressed in baggy, stained flannel pyjamas. His bare feet were pallid and splotched on the marble floor of the Lyons silk manufacturer.

"Where is the other bed?" Hardenburg asked. "Show me the other bed."

Christian took his arm delicately and led him across the narrow space until Hardenburg's knees touched the other mattress. "There," Hardenburg said flatly.

"Why?" Christian asked, feeling as though he were putting questions to ghosts fleeing past a window in a dream. "Why didn't you tell anybody you could walk?"

Standing there, wavering a little in the yellowing flannel, Hardenburg chuckled behind his casque of bandage. "It is always necessary," he said, "to keep a certain amount of crucial information about yourself from the authorities who control you." He leaned over and felt lightly around on the blanket covering the chest of the Burn. Then his hand stopped. "There," a voice said from behind the ice drift of bandage above the counterpane. The voice was hoarse and lacking in human timbre. It was as though a dying bird, a panther drowning slowly in its own blood, an ape crucified on a sharp branch in a storm in the jungle, had at last accomplished speech with one final word.

"There."

Hardenburg's hand stopped, pale yellow and bony, like a weathered and ancient X-ray of a hand on the white counterpane.

"Where is it?" he asked harshly. "Where is my hand, Diestl?"

"On his chest," Christian whispered, staring fixedly at the ivory, spread fingers.

"On his heart," Hardenburg said. "Just above his heart. We have practised this every night for two weeks." He turned, with blind certainty, and crossed to his bed and climbed into it. He pulled the sheet up to where the helmet of bandage, like archaic armour, rose from his shoulders. "Now bring the bayonet. Don't worry about yourself. I will hide it for two days after you have gone, so that nobody can accuse you of the killing. And I will do it at night, when no one comes into the room for eight hours. And he will keep quiet." Hardenburg chuckled. "The watchmaker is very good at keeping quiet."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian quietly, getting up to leave, "I will bring the bayonet."

He brought the crude knife the next morning. He stole it at a canteen in the evening while its owner was singing "Lili Marlene" loudly over beer with two soldiers from the Quartermaster Corps. He carried it under his tunic to the marble villa of the silk manufacturer, and slid it under the mattress as Hardenburg directed. He only looked back once from the door, after he had said goodbye to the Lieutenant, looked back once at the two white blind figures lying still in the parallel beds in the tall-ceilinged, rather gay room with the Bay shining and sunny outside through the high, elegant windows.

As he limped down the corridor, away from the room, his boots making a heavy, plebeian sound on the marble, he felt like a scholar who has graduated from a university whose every book he has memorized and sucked dry.

"ATTENTION!" a voice called from the door, dramatic and alarming, and Noah stiffened rigidly in front of his bunk.

Captain Colclough came in, followed by the Top Sergeant and Sergeant Rickett, and began his Saturday inspection. He walked slowly down the scrubbed middle aisle of the barracks, between the stiff rows of barbered and laundered soldiers. He peered heavily at their hairlines and the shine on their shoes, with a hostile impersonality, as though these were not men he was inspecting, but enemy positions. The blazing Florida sunshine struck in through the bare windows. The Captain stopped in front of the new man, Whitacre.

"Eighth General Order," Colclough said, staring coldly at Whitacre's necktie.

"To give the alarm," Whitacre said, "in case of fire or disorder."

"Rip that man's bed," Colclough said. Sergeant Rickett stepped between the bunks and tore down Whitacre's bed. The sheets made a dry, harsh sound in the still barracks.

"This is not Broadway, Whitacre," Colclough said. "You are not living at the Astor Hotel. The maid does not come in here in the morning. You have to learn to make a satisfactory bed, here."

"Yes, Sir," Whitacre said.

"Keep your goddamn mouth shut!" Colclough said. "When I want you to talk I will give you a direct question and you will answer, Yessir, or Nosir."

Colclough moved down the aisle, his heels strident on the bare floor. The Sergeants moved swiftly behind him as though noise, too, was a privilege of rank.

Colclough stopped in front of Noah. He stared ponderously at him. Colclough had very bad breath. It smelled as though something were rotting slowly and continuously in Colclough's stomach. Colclough was a National Guard officer from Missouri who had been an undertaker's assistant in Joplin before the war. His other customers, Noah thought crazily, probably did not mind the breath. He swallowed, hoping to drown the wild laughter that surged in his throat as the Captain glared at his chin for lurking signs of beard.

Colclough looked down at Noah's locker, at the sharply folded socks and the geometrically arranged toilet articles.

"Sergeant," he said, "remove the tray."

Rickett bent over and picked up the tray. Underneath were the rigidly folded towels, the stiffly arranged shirts, the woollen underwear, and under the other things, the books.

"How many books have you got there, Soldier?" Colclough asked.

"Three."

"Three what?"

"Three, Sir."

"Are they government issue?"

Under the woollen underwear there were Ulysses and the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot and the dramatic opinions of George Bernard Shaw. "No, Sir," said Noah, "they are not government issue."

"Only items of government issue, Soldier," said Colclough, his breath charging at Noah's face, "are to be exposed in lockers. Did you know that, Soldier?"

"Yes, Sir," Noah said.

Colclough bent down and knocked the woollen underwear roughly to one side. He picked up the worn grey copy of Ulysses. Involuntarily, Noah bent his head to watch the Captain.

"Eyes front!" Colclough shouted.

Noah stared at a knot-hole across the barracks.

Colclough opened the book and leafed through some of the pages. "I know this book," he said. "It is a filthy, dirty book." He threw it on the floor. "Get rid of it. Get rid of all of them. This is not a library, Soldier. You're not here to read." The book lay open, face down, its pages crumpled on the floor, isolated in the middle of the barracks. Colclough brushed past Noah, between the double bunks, over to the window. Noah could sense him moving heavily around behind his back. He had a queer, exposed twitching sensation at the base of his spine.

"This window," Colclough said loudly, "has not been washed. This goddamn barracks is a goddamn pigpen." He strode out to the aisle again. Without stopping to inspect the rest of the men waiting silently before their cots, he walked to the end of the barracks, followed lightly by the Sergeants. At the door he turned around.

"I'm going to teach you men to keep a clean house," he said.

"If you have one dirty soldier you're going to learn it's up to all of you to teach him to be clean. This barracks is confined to quarters until reveille tomorrow morning. There will be no passes given to anyone for the week-end and there will be an inspection tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. I advise you to make sure the barracks is in proper order by that time." He turned and went out.

"Rest!" Sergeant Rickett shouted and followed the Top Sergeant and the Captain out of the building.

Slowly, conscious of the hundred accusing, deprived eyes upon him, Noah moved out to the middle of the aisle, where the book was lying. He bent over and picked it up and absently smoothed the pages. Then he walked over to the window that had been the cause of all the trouble.

"Saturday night," he heard in tones of bitter anguish from the other side of the room. "Confined on Saturday night! I got a date with a waitress that is on the verge and her husband arrives tomorrow morning! I feel like killing somebody!"

Noah looked at the window. It sparkled colourlessly, with the flat, dusty, sun-bitten land behind it. On the lower pane in the corner a moth had somehow managed to fling itself against the glass and had died there in a small spatter of yellow goo. Reflectively, Noah lifted the moth off.